Archive for December, 2011

I wish you all the best this holiday season with this natural light show from Mount Rainier National Park last Saturday. If I have time in the next several days, I’ll post some more shots from that trip. Meanwhile, it’s my holiday wish that peace fills your heart, joy fills your days, and life gives you a chance to experience the incredible in the new year.

Capital Reef National Park was our last stop on our Southwest trip which ended in October. I love this place. The campground at Fruita is, in my opinion, among the best camping spots in the Southwest. The tent sites are mostly on grass, not dirt like most spots. The campground is very well shaded by trees. And it is situated next to several fruit orchards (apples, pears, cherries, apricots, and peaches), where campers are free to pick fresh fruit (free for “in orchard” eating, a small, reasonable, self-service fee is charged for taking some home). Need an apple for your day hike, stop by the orchards on your way to the trailhead! The Fremont River runs next to the campground, and scenic sandstone cliffs tower above it. And if you like wildlife, Fruita is mule deer central (not surprisingly with lots of green stuff to eat, a reliable water supply, and fruit dropping from the trees). And typically, it is fairly easy to get a camping spot. I’ve camped there four times, and have only been aced out once. You guessed it, that time was this trip.

Patterns formed on the sandstone by dripping water.

We went to Capital Reef on the spur of the moment. Our original itinerary called for us to drive to Moab, but as it was a Friday in the prime autumn season, I worried about finding a camping spot. So we opted to go to Capital Reef instead (like I said, I’ve never had a problem there). Well, the park must be becoming more popular, because we arrived before 3 p.m. and it had been full since noon. We had the option of camping anywhere on BLM land outside the park, but we had just done that for the previous three nights (one night at Bisti and two nights outside of Natural Bridges National Monument) and the western sky just outside the park was very dark with rain clouds. So we opted to find a motel in Torrey, about 10 mile west of the park. This worked well. It was nice to get a shower, and we had dinner at the fabulous restaurant Cafe Diablo. (It’s worth a trip to Torrey just to go to this restaurant. We ate there about five years ago and loved it then. At that time, the chef made a special meal for Tanya, who is gluten intolerant. This time, they had a gluten-free menu, and the food was as good as we remembered.)

Capital Reef is an unusual national park. It is only a few miles wide, but many miles long. This is because the park follows the Waterpocket Fold – a nearly 100 mile long monocline (that is a steeply inclined stack of layered rocks). Waterpocket Fold, which generally runs north-south, sticks up dramatically out of the ground, forming a formidable barrier to east-west travel. Thus, early settlers in the area thought of it like a barrier reef (which restricts travel by boat). It is called “capital” because it has some rock domes that resemble the Capital in Washington, DC and other such architectural domes. There are only three east-west roads through Capital Reef, and only one is easily traveled – Highway 24, which follows the Fremont River and goes through Fruita. Fruita was originally a Morman settlement (that’s where the fruit orchards originally came from).

Unfortunately, this trip we only had time to explore the region of the park near Fruita and along the Scenic Drive, a ten-mile paved road extending south of Fruita on the west side of the park. But there more than enough scenery for our two days in the area.

I highly recommend visiting Capital Reef. But be warned, Torrey seems to be growing, there are many more motels there than just five years ago. In a way, it reminds me of Moab before it became “Moab” (if you know what I mean). This park is getting more popular every year; try to get there before Torrey gets too big and Capital Reef gets too overrun.

Pasture fence in Fruita

Wildflowers along the Scenic Drive

Another scene from along the Scenic Drive

Deer grazing in Fruita

Horse and barn at Fruita

Sandstone cliffs

The Capital Dome from across the Fremont River Canyon (not visible, but directly below the bush).

In another break from the Southwest series of posts, I recently spent several hours with the Mountaineers at the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle. My friend and fellow photographer Gerald Reed led the trip several weeks back in mid-November. This trip gave me a chance to practice with my macro work, which I don’t do nearly enough. I use a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro lens with or without a set of extension tubes. Using natural light through the conservatory windows, a tripod was necessary for these shots, particularly on the cloudy, rainy day we were there. However, that cloudy sky did provide a nice light without a lot of contrast to work with. Luckily the conservatory allows tripods on weekdays (we were there on a Wednesday).

Macro photography is a different world. It’s amazing what things look like when you really get in really close. It takes a practiced eye to spot good compositions when looking at a greenhouse full of plants, particularly when looking for composition of several inches or less.

The other challenge with macro work is depth of field. Even with small apertures, the depth of field is amazingly small. For example, with my 100mm lens set to f/16, if I’m shooting from 10 feet (3 meters) away from my subject (which I normally wouldn’t do for macro work, normally I’d be much closer), the depth of field is 1.81 feet (55 centimeters). However, if I am shooting from only 1 feet (30.5 centimeters), a much more typical distance when doing macro work, the depth of field at f/16 is only 0.15 inches (3.8 millimeters). Move 25% closer, to 0.75 feet (22.9 centimeters), and the depth of field drops more than 50%, to 0.07 inches (1.8 millimeters). (I used the equations provided by DOFMaster for these calculations. The DOFMaster website also contains a convenient, on-line depth of field calculator for larger working distances.)

The extremely small depth of field makes focusing very critical – you purposely need to think about where to focus and how the composition will look with potentially large areas of the frame out of focus. If you try this type of photography, play around with your aperture to see what different results you can get (as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, I’m an habitual bracketer, including bracketing by aperture). By choosing a large aperture, you can force most everything out of focus to create more “artsy” images. Or go for a larger depth of field with a small aperture (though with very small apertures, you lose sharpness as well; though my macro lens goes down to f/32, I almost never use that aperture because it is so unsharp). If you want a wider depth of field that even a small aperture can’t give, you may have to give up magnification and back up from the subject to increase the depth of field.

In macro photography, your subject needs to hold still. Even using fast shutter speeds to freeze movement, this is true because of the limited depth of field. It’s very easy for a flower moving in the breeze, or a wandering bug on that flower, to move outside the depth of field. This is why I am so impressed with all those photographers who get great macro shots of insects. That’s why, as a relative beginner to macro work, I like working with plants – they don’t move on their own accord. A conservatory makes it even easier, no natural breezes to deal with.